Raking Jekyll

I’ve never really touched rake before, but since switching to Jekyll I’m finding that it’s becoming an essential part of my workflow. In the limited area of blogging, at least. rake is a version of make in which you define all your targets in Ruby. Because practically anything would be an improvement over Makefile syntax, …

How to generate PDFs from XML using Apache FOP in Ruby on Rails

The title is a bit of a mouthful. Sorry. Before we begin, I present the caveat that this code should not be used on a production system. It launches a java runtime for every single request, which would cripple you. This would need (a) output caching, and (b) some sort of persistent FOP server process …

Thoughts on Ruby on Rails after one day of work

I started looking at Rails (leading to my talking about scaffolding) because I wanted to try writing my next work-project in it. I don’t know about others… but I hate learning a language/framework in isolation from a project. Writing an insipid tutorial project that I don’t care about doesn’t involve me, and so I don’t …

Rails 2.0 Scaffolding

I’m learning Ruby on Rails starting with 2.0. This is occasionally problematic, as it was only released a few days ago, and the tutorials are still all for 1.2. So, to help others, something not mentioned in the release notes, which causes errors if you’re following the official tutorial. Scaffolding has changed. The 1.2 way …